MAYBE it's appropriate that Larry Heard has moved to Memphis, a city of legends. The ghosts of
delta bluesmen hang in the 80 degree autumn heat on Beale Street. Not far away is the Lorraine
Motel, where Martin Luther King was gunned down. And over on Union Avenue is Sun Studio, the
birthplace of rock n' roll, where Elvis, Jerry Lee and Carl Perkins made records that changed
the world. Even now, you might see soul legends like Isaac Hayes or Al Green grocery shopping in
a local store (though Stax, the legendary soul studio, is now nothing more than a burnt-out patch
of waste ground). Maybe, after all, it's perfect that Mr Fingers - house music's one, true
genius - should have chosen this place to play out his own personal endgame.
Before Larry Heard made his first record, house music was still struggling to break from its
influences. In the mid-1980s, the playlists of Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, the two biggest
house DJs in Chicago, were still rooted in tracks like Harold Melvin's 'Bad Luck', Klein & MBO's
'Dirty Talk' and the New York underground disco sound best captured by the Prelude label on
releases like Sharon Redd's 'Can You Handle It'. But Heard helped change all that. He took house
music into deep emotional space and wired freakiness, mapped a whole new psychic terrain onto
Chicago's relentless 4/4 and, in the process, influenced the romantic drift of techno which
reached its peak with Carl Craig's 'At Les', Derrick May's 'Icon' and 'Amalia' by As One.
In 1985, Heard was working for the US Government as a Benefit Authoriser. He used the proceeds
from his day job to buy a synthesiser and a drum machine. And, before he had ever set foot in a
house club, he made two tracks which changed the face of dance music. 'Mystery Of Love' was a slow,
lovesick 110bpm groove that later found its way into Larry Levan's all-time top five. 'Washing
Machine', the second track, was an insanely abstract prototype acid workout which preceded Phuture's
'Acid Trax' by two years. He hadn't ever done drugs - he was just exercising his "way-out mind " -
but its angular bleeps understood the shapes of MDMA perfectly.The releases that followed - with Robert Owens and Ron Wilson (another Benefit Office employee) as Fingers Inc, with street-poet Harry Dennis as The It and his own solo Mr Fingers material - built Larry Heard's reputation as the most gifted producer in house music. Fingers Inc's 'Another Side' has already been described as "the best house album ever made" but Heard's subsequent LPs, including 1994's exceptional 'Sceneries Not Songs Vol.1' and 1995's outstanding 'Alien' set, have consistently brushed up against genius.
However, Heard admits that "there have been a lot of mistakes in my relationship with music." There
were lurid tales of sour deals with Trax and DJ International, Chicago's biggest house labels during
the mid-1980s. The unauthorised release of his instrumental demos on Jack Trax's notorious 'Amnesia'
album. Then Harry Dennis became addicted to heroin forcing Heard to cut himself loose despite the
creative brilliance of The It project. "I had drug-dealers chasing me down the street for Harry,"
he recalls. "I just didn't need that, it's not part of who I am."
And then, there was his major label deal with MCA. Ren' Gelston, a long-time friend of Heard's and
his one-time manager remembers how, despite the international success of the 'Introduction' album
in 1992, the label first tried to involve other producers on the follow-up 'Back To Love' LP
(including Simon Laws who'd worked with Soul II Soul) and then decided against releasing it.
"They didn't understand him," he explains. "They wanted something else, they wanted to change him.
Then they installed a new head of A&R who decided he only wanted UK artists on the label so they
dropped him. A year later, Larry was in the MCA office and the same guy was all over him saying he
was a legend and a genius. But by then it was too late." The album was eventually released on
Gelston's own Black Market label, but Heard still sees it as being creatively flawed. "I couldn't
care less about it," he says, dismissively.
Throughout it all, Heard has had to combat severe bouts of depression. The old-fashioned term for it is more poetic. They used to call it melancholia. And if there is a defining characteristic in the spaced-out, blissfully brilliant music of Mr Fingers it's the bitter-sweet veins of melancholy which trace through his records. On his most celebrated release, the definitive house music anthem 'Can You Feel It', those ghosts twist sorrow and ecstasy together like tears and rain. It's probably the most perfect house record ever made. "It's not like I've had the easiest life in the world..." confides Mr Fingers.